whart57

It wasn't remarked upon much at the time, but Oldham's first home fixture in the National League back in August was against Dorking Wanderers. So a club that had spent the last thirty years descending from the Premier League met a club that started at the bottom of the Crawley and District League in 1999. Must be rare to have such vastly different club histories.

That might be because the signal was too strong, though if that were the case then I would have thought local TV engineers would simply have put an attenuator in line with the aerial. Another possibility is that as the signal strength from an aerial maps out as ellipses or lobes - depending on aerial type - you might have been in a dead zone.

Now that the final issues are being settled, should we have a call out for those clubs who are entering uncharted territory next season? I'd like to nominate Broadbridge Heath FC who have won the Southern Combination (formerly Sussex County League) and all being well will be in the Isthmian League next season (Not sure whether it will be South East or South Central division, could be either). This is a club that was in Intermediate football not that long ago. Any others worth a mention?

The H shaped aerial was BBC only (405 line VHF). For ITV you needed a YAGI, albeit a much bigger one than the later BBC2 one. All to do with the different frequency bands. Of course, if you lived in Telford new town, in the shadow of the Wrekin transmitter, a bit of wire poked into the aerial socket of the TV worked brilliantly ......

I'm pretty certain that if the promotion and relegation between Premiership and Championship were as automatic and treated as the normal rewards for success and failure as they are in round ball football that Jersey would be excited about having the top sides come down to play them. As would Ealing and Cornish Pirates. But I suspect you are right, they would be breaking into a clique that doesn't really want them there, and that can be toxic.

I was mildly surprised that Lebanon had an international rugby league side competing in the RL World Cup. Until I recalled that there was a sizeable Lebanese expat community living around Sydney and that these players were lesser lights in the NRL who happened to have a Lebanese parent or grandparent.

Following on from Championship clubs thinking the Premiership and RFU are hanging them out to dry, National League clubs are also asking for clarification on what the plans for the semi-professional game are. One thing, apart from promotion and relegation, that concerns them is the proposal to have a different tackle law in the semi-pro and community leagues from that in the Premiership and Championship. League One clubs, many of whom provide game time for young players from Premiership clubs, say this would mean players having to adjust to different laws depending on the competition they are playing in.

It's the other end of the National League where some strange things are happening. Scunthorpe and Yeovil were in the Championship no more than a dozen years ago, now they are dropping into the regional leagues. Torquay is also likely to drop down as Maidenhead, three points above them, have a superior goal difference going into the last games. Given that you do have to worry for Rochdale, could they drop straight through as well? Hartlepool and Crawley have recently experienced the National League so whichever of the two join Rochdale on the down escalator, the fans and management know what's coming, they are likely to adapt. Will Rochdale?

Indeed they did Not bad when you consider this was the South Eastern's Boat Train loco of the era

About fifteen years ago I was working on a project in Kansas. While I was there I thought I'd visit the two model shops listed in the online Yellow Pages. Not just out of curiosity, I was using Kadee couplings and they were tricky to get hold of in the UK at the time. Two very different experiences. One, which has an address of a hundred and something street, was a friendly place, carried a healthy amount of stock and had an 8'x4' layout in the middle of the shop which wasn't particularly brilliant but was available to try things out on or show off Walthers kits on. The other, closer in, looked to be on the way out. Half empty shelves, surly owner, nothing to entice you to buy anything. The most interesting thing about it was that a major railway line ran down the street outside. I had to wait for a long train of box cars to pass before I could cross the street to where I'd parked the car.

The Michael Crichton story The First Great Train Robbery is back on iPlayer for a bit. Roscommon is playing the part of Kent, and various Dublin stations play London Bridge, but the producers need a pat on the back for the effort put into recreating an early Victorian Boat Train out of Irish railway material. The plot is based on a real event, right down to the mark being the same - gold being shipped from London to Paris by train - but, oh my, what a bit of 1970s period hokum the film turns out to be, despite Sean Connery and Donald Sutherland playing the lead roles. Still fun though.

And fail just as camera and book shops did around the turn of the century. It's all very well buying stock in to show and demonstrate but your friendly retailer does the work and the customer then goes home, logs onto the computer and buys from Amazon or one of the big box shifters Elsewhere on this site people are bitterly criticising Hornby's sales strategy for TT-120. We may not like it - I don't - but Simon Kohler has devised a go to market plan that reflects current shopping habits. There are two sorts of model shops that will survive - the very big and the very small. I don't know Rails or Hattons, never been there, but I do know Gaugemaster. Shopping there is a pleasure. It has a car park and a railway station (OK not solely for Gaugemaster customers obviously, but Ford station is right by the door), and inside it is light, airy and well spaced out. As for the very small, my advice for local councils wanting to revive town centres, is to take an old department store they can't get a tenant for, and create an indoor market of microshops. No vaping outlets, the only mobile phone stores are ones owned and run by a lone techie, and encourage model shops, specialised haberdasheries, crystal peddling types and other New Age woo-woo stuff, to take 10 or 20 sq metre units which open on a full or part-time basis. Get Costa or Starbucks - or an independent - to open a coffee shop, and on the hard to let top floor, offer space to model railway clubs, art clubs, pottery schools and others of that ilk at a peppercorn rent. The fun needs to come back into shopping if town centres are to survive.

I don't know whether it is Covid or whether the top divisions are pricing themselves out of the "dad and lads" market but attendances in non-league are increasing quite healthily. Bay's gates have been double what they were getting pre-Covid, though being in a higher league has something to do with that. More noticeable is that the Sussex derbies involving Horsham, Lewes and Bognor have all had crowds of well over the thousand mark, and this is in tier seven. Crawley in League Two have had some gates that were no bigger than that.

The Guardian has some thought provoking articles on the future of the Championship, one of them reporting some pretty bitter accusations from Coventry RFC's chief executive that the Premiership and RFU are deliberately running the Championship into the ground so that it would be easier to get rid of. It is suggested that the RFU sees a future where there are only ten professional clubs in a ring-fenced competition and the rest of the clubs play in regionalised leagues with no opportunity to win promotion.

As always in IT a new technology has two sorts of advocate, the people who have invested time at effort into it and those who make their living out of hype. AI is no different. When I was at IBM we were given lots of publicity internally on Watson, IBM's initial offerings in the field. What we were given was realistic assessments of capabilities, IBM didn't want the sales force over-promising, and one application that sticks in the mind was helping doctors cope with the tsunami of medical research papers they were subjected to. The idea was that Watson would "read" them, digest what they were about and present relevant ones to doctors when they prescribed medicines or suggested treatments. Of course the step from there to a system for people to self-medicate by putting some symptoms in an on-line form is not very big, but at the time IBM was clear that Watson was an aid to, not a replacement for, medical professionals. I read recently that the Guardian newspaper is evaluating ChatGPT. The piece, by the group's IT director, didn't specify what they saw AI doing for them, but I can quite imagine that AI would be very useful in maintaining and updating the thousands of obituaries - written while people are still alive - that the Guardian keeps on file ready for the day they are required. AI could also have a role in fact-checking politicians assertions. As long as the role of AI is to highlight inconsistencies to a human reporter and not actually make decisions I don't see a problem. AI depends on having a vast amount of data to learn from and I can't see how it would have that in the case of model shops. Even the largest, the Hattons, Rails and Gaugemasters, are small fry in the wider business world. And as many have already pointed out, it's the fixed costs of rent, rates, energy and staff wages going up taking away the ability to expand the stock on offer that is killing the retail trade. AI won't help with that.

Economics is not part of the equation. There are two geo-political goals here, both of which rely on the extension from that Laos-Thai border to Bangkok and then the deep water harbours in the Gulf of Thailand. One is to give southern China an alternative sea outlet, and the other is to tie the Thai and other SE Asian economies into the Chinese one. Thailand is one of the main rice producers in the world and it has a more varied agricultural sector as well. Already a lot of that output is now heading north whereas before Thai agricultural exports headed to the West. Thai and Malay factories also supply the West with components like instruments for cars or storage for computers. Again, China would like that feeding its own industries rather than providing the West with stuff they can't afford to make themselves.

Well that's it, back to the South East Division. Once again a bad start undermined the Bay, letting Wingate rack up a two goal lead before pulling one back just before the break. Two more goals for Wingate right at the end hammered the nails in good and proper. This side is good enough to bounce back, but this is non-league, how many of this side will return in July in the lower division?

I have been reading about the magical thinking going on at Wasps. If this plan works it will really show up what is wrong with the rugby union set up. Wasps after all are little more than a name right now, and a lot of people were burned by the club's failure. Yet the name was big enough for the RU powers that be to grant them a slot in the Championship and to deem that their training ground in Henley in Arden is fit to host second tier rugby. The owners of Ealing and other second and third tier clubs might have a view on that given how they have had to shell out to improve facilities over the years or be threatened with relegation. Then the talk is of returning to the Premiership for the 2024-25 season, now playing in a brand new stadium somewhere in the M40 corridor. This prospectus - and prospectus it is as it is aimed at those people with the odd million to spare to put into the club - doesn't recognise that this is a sporting organisation. It's not like business where innovation, marketing and lobbying allow growth. Rugby's rules are fixed, the league structure is not very flexible and being good is not enough, or even relevant. You can stink the place out as long as you are better than the other guys.

Interesting one on the delayed high speed line. The political implications of a direct rail connection to China, without the break of gauge at the Laos border, seems to be dawning on some in Thailand.

Well, hanging by a thread now. Bay gave it a good crack, scored three goals but unfortunately Cray scored five. And Kingstonian won as expected at already relegated Corinthian-Casuals. That's a six point gap with two to play. Kingstonian have two to play against promotion chasing sides though so their 39 points is probably their lot. Bay on the other hand go to Wingate, who only made themselves safe this weekend and three points there and then its top of the table Bishops Stortford at Winches Field. Seems like the top of the table clash in the National League lived up to billing - in the second half anyway.

Keep it positive, mate.

Herne Bay is my home town club even though I no longer have any connection to any more. When I first watched them they were in something called the Aetolian League. They had been in the Kent League but that folded when the Southern League expanded by a division and the biggest Kent League clubs joined that. The Aetolian League also folded when the Athenian League - second only to the Isthmian in prestige within amateur football at the time - expanded with two extra divisions. Bay were in Division Two and missed out on promotion all the years I watched them as a youngster. They finally won promotion to the Athenian League first division the year I left for uni. And a year or two later the Isthmian co-opted most of the top Athenian League sides when they expanded. Bay dropped back into the reformed Kent League. Herne Bay had a good side in the 1990s, they won the Kent League a couple of times but the ground was not up to the standard required for the Southern League - no floodlights - so promotion was ruled out. The noughties were a bit fallow but then another decent side was put together, one that made the semi-finals of the FA Vase and won the Kent League again. This time promotion was secured to Isthmian Division One South East. Promotion into the Isthmian Premier came through the play-offs and through reorganisation of the Isthmian after some clubs withdrew or merged after the Covid crisis. So to say that Bay was prepared for the higher league - one where the top clubs have four-figure gates - would be wrong. Not least a planned 3G pitch installation meant the first home games had to be played down the road at Ramsgate. So to be still in with a shout of survival this far in is much the best anyone hoped.

The National League, or Conference as many still think of it as, must be one of the hardest leagues to get out of. Upwards anyway, it's not that hard to drop out of. That wasn't the case when automatic promotion and relegation came in twenty odd years ago. Then the side that dropped out of the EFL was almost certain to go back up as they were the only full time side in the comp. These days there are few part-time sides left in the National League proper. However with only one automatic promotion slot and one decided by the lottery of play-offs it takes the sort of consistency that players at that level rarely have (if they did they would be employed higher up) to get out of that league. But unpredictability is one of the things that makes non-league football fun.

Cray Wanderers have a railway link. The club history says that the club was formed as a result of regular informal games between locals and navvies building the Cray Valley viaduct of the LCDR.

Saturday's Isthmian Premier scores make good reading on the North Kent coast. Thrashings for Kingstonian and Bowers not only denying them points but also harming their goal differences and a win for Wingate making them safe from the drop help the Bay cause the most.